Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Hi! The Skinner's guide is aimed to help you make minecraft skins. It was made because too many people were copying and ripping off others' great works of art. Anyone can make a minecraft skin, but it's not as simple to make it look really effective! This is a beginner's guide to the basics. Feel free to comment on anything, and to incorporate anything you see in the images into your skins.

The Skinner's Guide cannot stress enough that copying others' skins includes changing the colours, adding noise, and creating your skin from 'parts'. These 'parts' have been taken without permission from other people's work for you to use. The same components get boring for people downloading, too.

All of the examples on this page were made in Miners Need Cool Shoes:

www.minershoes.com

(the skin editing section NOT THE ARMOURY). The download page of 'MCSkinEdit' (a skin editor that is not online) can be found

Noise is an effect that most skin editors will let you use. It takes the colour you have selected, and when you draw, instead of just one solid colour, it appears in different shades on the pixels. The image below is an example of a red hood with the noise effect, as well as the noise button as it appears on http://www.minershoes.com/ .

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Almost every skin has eyes. A lot of them are just drawn on to the head, but sometimes, the eyes or parts of the eyes are drawn onto the 'hat' region in the editor. This can sometimes create an effect where the eyes 'move' when you move the skin to different angles. There are probably hundreds of ways to draw them, but here are some to get you started:

Mouths are a feature that you have to use on almost every skin. They are drawn on to the bottom of the face, generally two pixels (or squares) below the eyes. There are many different styles of mouth that you can add to your skin. Here are just a few.

Hair is an almost essential feature on any skin meant to look like a person. The way the hair looks really adds character to skins. Hair is really effective when it is partly or fully drawn in the 'hat' section.

Eyebrows are an optional feature. They may be used to make a skin look more human, or to emphasise the expression on the face. Eyebrows are mostly drawn in the 'hat' section, but can also be drawn on the head. There are some simple eyebrow designs in the image below.

Hats are 'boxes' that fit the heads of skins inside them. Hats can be used in a number of ways to enhance your skin. They can be edited (in skin editors) in the sections with 'hat' left, right, front or back written in them, usually to the right of the 'head' sections. Not only can they be used for hats, but hoods, hair, eyes- which can create a sort of 'moving eye' effect - and many more! A lot of popular skins have hats.

Apart from facial features, hair and hats, there are some simple techniques you can use to make your skins look more effective than they would with just solid colours.

Gradients:Gradients are an effective way of shading your skin. All you have to do is get a colour, and select the shades getting gradually lighter or darker etc. and place them next row or column, so that it looks smooth. This effect also looks good diagonally.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Publishing your skins is really easy. There are a lot of websites willing to host a download page for your skin. The most popular are:

The Skindex: Post skins without making an account. Very popular among minecraftians. The Skindex can be found here: http://www.minecraftskins.com

Planet Minecraft: Requires you to make a free account. You may post as many skins as you like. Can also post projects, texture packs, mods, servers, and blogs. Paste this into your address bar to go to Planet Minecraft: www.planetminecraft.com